VOLUME 2, 2006

The Vienna of Hitler and Freud: An Undergraduate Seminar Course

Ian Reifowitz SUNY-Empire State College

This essay discusses “The Vienna of Hitler and Freud,” a seminar course that examines the culture of the Habsburg capital in the period from 1867 through 1938, with a particular focus on the years just before and after 1900.

The goal of this course was twofold. First, it sought to introduce students to broad historical debates about the nature of Viennese fin-de-siècle culture by having them read political and cultural histories about that society. Then, it asked them to read important works of fiction and non-fiction produced in that society and attempt to assess how accurately these works reflected each of the historical arguments they had previously discussed. This approach can produce fruitful results with well-prepared, motivated students at many different kinds of post- secondary institutions.

Teaching Austria, Volume 2 (2006) 89 More broadly, the goal of this kind of seminar is for students to gain an understanding of how to study in depth any historical topic or period of time. I sought to develop their analytical skills in examining primary and secondary sources. Furthermore, I encouraged them to look for common themes across their sources that reflect broad trends in a given society and culture. The course was designed to impart skills that will hopefully aid students in any kind of advanced study they might eventually undertake, either in or outside of academia.

Course Context and Requirements

I offered "The Vienna of Hitler and Freud" as an upper-level (i.e. junior and senior) seminar at Georgetown University in the spring of 1999, although it was designed so that sophomores with a strong background in modern European history could certainly succeed in it. Students needed to have taken at least an introductory survey course in modern European history before this class in order to have the proper context to examine the culture of Vienna around 1900.

The course met once a week, fifteen times spanning the semester, for approximately two hours per meeting. Discussions of assigned readings took up the first twelve weekly class meetings. One week midway through the semester was devoted to one-on-one meetings with me to discuss students’ research projects. Students’ brief presentations of their research papers, as well as feedback and questions from their peers, were the focus of the final two meetings.

The class consisted of twenty undergraduate students, approximately evenly divided by gender. Students had to read 200-400 pages per week and, in preparation for each meeting, to write a one-page "reaction paper" that asked them to respond to what they had read in an organized fashion. I found that doing so ensured that each student was able to contribute to the discussion because the assignment required them to prepare their thoughts prior to the meeting.

This was important because the requirements of the class included significant participation by students during class meetings. Students had to select one of the secondary sources assigned and write a formal 2-3 page analysis of its argument, due the day that book was to be discussed. Each student also delivered an oral presentation, including questions for the class to discuss, on the readings assigned for one of the class meetings during the semester. Starting with the third meeting, each class began with a presentation by one or two of the students; their questions served as a starting point for the broader class discussion of that week’s reading. At the first meeting, students selected the week they would give their presentations. Finally, at the end of the

Teaching Austria, Volume 2 (2006) 90 semester, each student turned in a research paper (approximately 15 pages) on a topic they chose (through consultation with me) that related in some way to the culture and/or history of the period examined during the semester.

In addition to the content-related learning, taken collectively the assignments required students to prepare for, participate in, and lead a serious academic discussion that explored historical and cultural issues in depth, as well as to analyze and critique in writing the work of a historian or historians. Students were also expected to gain skills in conducting in depth research, utilizing both primary (often in translation due to language constraints) and secondary sources, and to explore a topic in detail. Students’ semester grades were calculated as follows: 10% for their weekly one page ‘reaction papers’ (the average of the grades on these during the semester), 10% for their oral presentation of a week’s readings, 10% for the 2-3 page paper on one assigned secondary source, 30% for their general class participation, and 40% for their research paper. (A complete syllabus, which contains minor revisions from the original 1999 version, appears at the end of this article as an appendix.)

I structured the seminar in this manner to foster students’ engagement with the material. The assignment of weekly reaction papers, as well as beginning each meeting with student presentations served a particular goal: to have class time consist largely of student-generated discussion rather than my explaining what was important. For this reason I did no formal lecturing. I contributed by choosing the readings to guide the students’ learning. This does not, however, mean that I never directly interjected my own thoughts into the conversation. Typically, I had a few specific themes I wanted the students to explore at each meeting.

I often spoke little or at all during the first 80 to 90 minutes of a given meeting, and remained largely silent throughout if the student discussion had in fact covered what I had hoped it would as long as the students kept the conversation going themselves in what I considered a reasonably productive direction. If, however, one or more themes I had hoped they would explore remained uncovered much beyond the halfway point in the meeting, I would wait for a lull in the conversation and introduce a question aimed at moving the discussion in that direction. I tried to do this only when necessary, so that the students initiated as much of the conversation and analysis as possible. I hoped to give them maximum freedom within the structure I had designed.

I took this approach for the following reasons. First, if I introduced my themes for the day’s discussion at the outset, it may well have limited the discussion to those themes. During our meetings, students often brought up points that I had not considered, or looked at questions from a different way than I might have. My limiting or narrowing the discussion would likely have prevented

Teaching Austria, Volume 2 (2006) 91 such productive exploration. I chose the assignments and structured the course, with an authority derived from years of research and study of this society, and students understood this. Nevertheless, I wanted them to feel that they had an active role in determining how they as a group reacted to the materials I had given them. Motivated students respond to being given the intellectual responsibility to guide the course of their own learning and exploration. They also feel a greater satisfaction when they come up with their own insights on what they have read than when the instructor tells them what insights they should have gained. This kind of satisfaction leads to a greater love of learning, which to me is the overarching goal of liberal arts education to begin with.

Course Syllabus and Rationale

After an introductory meeting in the first week, the following meeting asked students to become familiar with the broader political history of Austria-Hungary during this period (see the Appendix for the syllabus and other course materials). I assigned the bulk of Steven Beller’s Francis Joseph, as well as sections from Alan Sked’s The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire. Beller’s is a highly readable and concise account of the political history of the period that incorporates the historiography up through the mid-1990s. More recently, Robin Okey’s The Habsburg Monarchy has appeared in print, but its length and degree of detail make it more appropriate to serve as a core text in a course on the history of modern Austria-Hungary. I concluded that the Beller text continues to be the better choice to serve the needs of this course, although a more historiographically up-to-date text, if equally readable, would be desirable when one appears in print. Students also read Sked for an opposing view of the broad historiographical question that looms over historians who study the last decades of Austria-Hungary, namely why did it fall?

Beller argues that the main cause of the Monarchy’s fall was the political strife among the nationalities, which resulted from the inability and unwillingness of the long-serving Emperor Francis Joseph to democratize the political system in order to grant some form of autonomy and equality to all his peoples at the expense of his own personal authority. Sked, on the other hand, deemphasizes domestic factors and contends that external forces, namely a long war that strained its resources and a final defeat that destroyed its political legitimacy caused the Monarchy to dissolve in November, 1918. This initial reading assignment and the subsequent discussion during this meeting allowed students to gain a broad understanding of the historiographical debates about Austria- Hungary as well as the basic features of that society in the last decades before the First World War.

At this first substantive meeting (the second overall meeting) there was no student presentation, and I guided the conversation a bit more than I did at

Teaching Austria, Volume 2 (2006) 92 subsequent meetings, if only to ensure that the class discussed important historical developments during the period. The students offered their analysis of the revolution and counter revolution of 1848-49, the enactment of the dualist Ausgleich (Compromise) of 1867 that divided the Monarchy into two semi- autonomous states (Austria and Hungary), the increasing impact of nationalist thought on Habsburg politics, and the role of the Emperor. Finally, the students explored how these political developments, as well as the perceptions of the state’s long-term prospects for success held by various groups might have affected Viennese culture of that time. Clearly, this was a great deal of material to cover and I did not expect students to gain a mastery of this complex society and all its issues. My goal was for students to become familiar enough with the basic political history of Austria-Hungary to have a context for understanding the relationship between that society and the culture it produced.

The next section of the course, covering three meetings, was devoted to students reading cultural histories of the period. The goal during these weeks was to expose the students to various interpretations of why Viennese culture and thought developed the way it did during this period. The extensive amount of writing by historians on fin-de-siècle Vienna grew out of the work of Carl Schorske, whose essays from the two prior decades were published in the 1981 collection in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. Thus I assigned students to read Schorske’s work and discuss it in week 3. Having examined political developments in week 2, my hope was that they would have gained a foundation for dealing with Schorske’s argument that the defeat of liberalism in Austria and Vienna specifically, as exemplified by the election of the antisemitic Christian Social Karl Lueger as Mayor of Vienna in 1897, caused a generation of alienated, liberal, bourgeois men and women (although Schorske does not discuss gender) to seek an escape from politics in a life of aesthetics. Their alienation from society, according to Schorske, combined with their despair over the defeat of the liberal rationalism that formed the core of their intellectual foundations, led them to invent a new cultural outlook that broke from the optimism of the previous period, in which the success of liberalism, progress, and Enlightenment seemed assured.

The subsequent week’s assignment, Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna, built on Schorske’s argument by examining in greater detail the main cultural figures of the time, as well as how their cultural innovations grew out of their fears for the survival of their society, namely liberal Austria. The class discussed the book’s arguments and grappled with the question of how cultural innovations grow out of changes in the society where its creators live.

The final assignment of this three week section examining cultural histories of Vienna around 1900 was Steven Beller’s Vienna and the Jews: A

Teaching Austria, Volume 2 (2006) 93 Cultural History, 1867-1938. I wanted students to see how Beller challenged Schorske and the consensus that had grown around his argument by re- examining who was actually responsible for the bulk of the literary and artistic works that made up the innovative culture of Vienna around 1900. He offered a statistical analysis of the bourgeois class that had been alienated by liberalism’s decline and defeat in Vienna, arguing that the alienated bourgeoisie was actually an overwhelmingly Jewish bourgeoisie. Schorske had noted the representation of Jews among the bourgeoisie in his own book, but argued that, due to their acculturation in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, these Jews simply reflected the larger milieu into which they had integrated. Beller turned Schorske’s argument on its head, explaining that these Jews had integrated into an Enlightenment-based culture of rationalism that most bourgeois Germans in Vienna, not to mention Austro-Germans in general, had rejected. Thus, these Jews were alienated not as members of a bourgeoisie whose liberal values were rejected by Viennese society but as members of a Jewish bourgeoisie who had adopted a new culture that only other bourgeois Viennese Jews shared. I encouraged the students to think about the importance of antisemitism and antiliberalism (as well as the relationship between the two) to Viennese culture.

From the quality and content of the discussions, I could see that students gave significant thought to these analyses of Viennese culture. The class then moved from reading cultural histories of Vienna around 1900 to examining this culture for themselves. They examined fictional works that sought to provide a different way to understand why this cultural explosion occurred in that place and time. The students next read Arthur Schnitzler’s The Road into the Open (1908, Der Weg ins Freie), and we explored his interpretation of Viennese bourgeois society and the place of Jews in it as presented through the eyes of Georg, his protagonist. In the following meeting the students dealt with three short plays by Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Death and the Fool (Der Thor und Der Tod, 1893), Electra (Elektra, 1903), and The Tower (Der Turm, 1925). We examined the lack of meaningful, positive connections to other people that Hofmannsthal’s characters experienced in these plays and how this issue relates to the analyses of Viennese culture students had read earlier.

I felt it important for the students to comprehend how Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler fit into both Beller and Schorske’s arguments, so I briefly explained their personal histories. Whereas Schnitzler himself was Jewish, Hofmannsthal’s family had converted, although he was for the most part treated as a Jew by Viennese society. This experience was typical for those of Jewish descent. Understanding this allowed students to make sense of Steven Beller’s stance, namely that because people like Hofmannsthal experienced Vienna and its treatment of Jews in a manner similar to those who remained officially part of the Jewish community, their works reflect many of the same issues of Jewish

Teaching Austria, Volume 2 (2006) 94 bourgeois alienation as did those of Schnitzler, even though the latter was Jewish and the former was Gentile.

The next three weeks’ readings consisted of political and/or intellectual works that came out of Vienna around 1900, or whose authors were significantly influenced by that culture. In the first week the class read sections from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925). In this meeting students tried to gain some understanding of the nature of Hitler’s antisemitism, how it reflected Viennese and, more broadly, Austro-German attitudes towards Jews and modern society in general. The following week’s assignment included Theodor Herzl’s political tract, The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat, 1896), and his utopian novel, Old-New Land (Altneuland, 1902). Students examined his political beliefs regarding the founding of a Jewish polity and his vision for how that society would look twenty years hence, as well as his rejection of assimilation as an option for Jews. The class discussed these works as another type of response to the alienation of the bourgeoisie, from a definitively Jewish nationalist perspective, exploring the differences between Herzl’s approach and the much less self-assured, ambivalent works of Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler.

At this point, approximately six weeks before the semester’s end, I scheduled an individual meeting with each student in lieu of that week’s class meetings. They presented the topics of their research paper to me in the form of a statement explaining the questions they planned to explore, as well as a preliminary thesis based on their source material, which they were to have already examined, at least to some degree. They also had to present a list of primary and secondary sources they intended to use in their research. I found this individual tutorial session helpful for the students. It encouraged them to begin their research early in the semester, and gave me an opportunity to give them feedback and guidance at a mid-point in the process. It allowed me to be more of a mentor, as opposed to being only an evaluator of the end product of their research.

The class then read Sigmund Freud’s Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (delivered in 1909) and Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930). We discussed Freud’s pessimism regarding the success of Enlightenment rationalism and how this reflected the themes we had been exploring throughout the course.

The next two weeks’ assignments consisted of writers looking back at Vienna 1900 from a later time. The class first read Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March (1932), a nostalgic work of fiction set in the last decades of Austria- Hungary. Students discussed Roth’s rosy portrayal of Austrian politics and society and debated how it compared with the depictions of the other authors they had read. The final reading assignment was Stefan Zweig’s The World of

Teaching Austria, Volume 2 (2006) 95 Yesterday (Die Welt von Gestern, 1943), an autobiographical account that spans his life from late nineteenth century Vienna through his death in 1942. Through Zweig’s flight from Nazi Europe and eventual suicide, the book allowed the students to see the ultimate, physical alienation of a member of the group who created so much of Viennese culture at the turn of the previous century and to bring together their perceptions gained from the whole of the semester’s readings. The final two class meetings were devoted to brief (approximately ten minutes) students’ presentations of their paper topics and to broad reflections on the themes of the semester.

Conclusion: Outcomes

In assessing the success of the course, I was highly impressed with the quality of the student presentations and discussions during the meetings. Much of the credit for this certainly goes to the students, although my sense is that the course structure and assignments also had a positive impact in this regard. The students’ written work, with the expected variations in quality, largely demonstrated that they gave much thought to the broad themes and questions we raised. Their research papers, although dealing with a wide array of topics ranging from an analysis of three women Viennese writers to the last ditch attempt to reform Austria-Hungary in the weeks before its dissolution, reflected serious attempts by students to apply these themes and questions to their individually chosen topics.

In addition to the quality of the students’ papers, I can also judge the success of the course based on feedback from the students in the form of their official course evaluations. The students were asked to give a rating from one to five (with five being the most positive) on a number of subjects. When compared to other Georgetown courses at the same level and in the same discipline (Social Sciences), the students’ overall evaluations of the course instructor were 4.89, which represents a rating somewhere between the 75th (4.80) and the 90th (5.00) percentile. Comparative ratings for other questions in the student evaluations were not provided by the University, but on the question of “effectiveness of the reading assignments,” the overall rating was 4.68, and on the question of “how much did you learn?” the rating was also 4.68. These figures suggest that students themselves found the course stimulating. Based on the students’ work and their evaluations of their experiences, I would judge the course a success.

I would make one change in the assignments. Because of the close relationship between Schorske’s argument and that of Janik and Toulmin, the class discussion at the meeting where I had assigned the latter book was less successful than others, as the class too often rehashed themes explored in the previous week. The students were ready to go straight from the Schorske book to

Teaching Austria, Volume 2 (2006) 96 Beller’s Vienna and the Jews so that they could debate the merits of the two authors’ opposing arguments.

I have thus altered the syllabus so that more time is devoted to reading literature from the period in place of Janik and Toulmin’s book. I considered inserting selections from Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 1930, 1933, 1942), but the inclusion of Roth and Zweig make another nostalgic work somewhat redundant. Two other options make sense. Depending on the schedule of a particular school’s semester and/or whether the instructor wishes to make other structural changes such as removing one of the weeks of student presentations, one or both of these might fit into the syllabus.

I thought students would also benefit from reading both Karl Kraus’ The Last Days of Mankind (Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, 1918), a searing critique of Austria-Hungary during World War I, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (Der Prozeß, 1925), a satirical and harsh examination of Austrian society through its bureaucratic heartlessness. I debated whether to use Kraus, who is more directly Viennese than Kafka, a Prague writer, although one could certainly argue that Kafka’s writing is broadly Habsburg Austrian in terms of focus, and as a member of the Jewish bourgeoisie who had integrated into German culture, the developments in Vienna also affected Kafka’s mindset as much as it did those of his Viennese Jewish brethren. For that matter, Joseph Roth spent comparatively little time in Vienna, having grown up in Austrian Galicia and spent the interwar years largely in Berlin and Paris. Adolf Hitler also lived relatively briefly in Vienna. Kafka’s works are likely to be easier for students to find than those of Kraus, and this may be an important consideration for instructors as well. The revised syllabus that follows this essay includes both readings to give those interested in using it as many choices as possible.

Teaching Austria, Volume 2 (2006) 97 APPENDIX

Ian Reifowitz Course Syllabus The Vienna of Hitler and Freud

Course Description: Our course centers on the intellectual and cultural history of nineteenth and early twentieth century Vienna, a fertile breeding ground for some of the explosive ideas that have dominated the previous century. One cannot fully understand these ideas without examining the complex society that produced them. Thus, we will begin by using secondary sources to look at the political issues that roiled Austria-Hungary in order to assess how phenomena such as the rising tides of nationalism and ethnic prejudice, as well as the defeat of traditional liberalism, affected the cultural and intellectual life of its central city. We will then discuss analyses offered by historians for the explosion of modern culture in Vienna. Finally, we will explore the products of Vienna’s turbulent history through primary sources: the works of some of its greatest literary figures as well as writings from three of the most important cultural and political icons of the past century in an attempt to discover how these individuals reflected the environment in which they spent their formative years.

Our meetings will consist of a discussion of the readings and related issues. These discussions will require significant participation on the part of each of you. At each meeting you will hand in a short (approximately one page) “reaction paper” in which you address one or two aspects of the reading(s) you found particularly thought provoking. These are meant to give you the opportunity to organize your thoughts before class. Please note that you must turn in a reaction paper for every meeting, even if you miss class.

Class will begin with a 5 minute presentation on the readings by one or two students that includes whatever they choose to emphasize, and ends with questions the student(s) would like to see discussed. In addition, you will write a 2-3 page book review-style analysis of one of the secondary sources during the first half of the semester.

Research Paper: Throughout the semester you will work on a 12-15 page (we will discuss more specifics in class) research paper that is due on the last day of class. The paper will be on a topic of your choosing (selected in consultation with me) that relates in some way to the questions and themes raised during the semester.

Course Grade: Reaction Papers: 10% of your grade Presentation of Readings: 10% of your grade Short Paper: 10% of your grade Participation in Discussions: 30% of your grade Research Paper: 40% of your grade

Teaching Austria, Volume 2 (2006) 98 Schedule of Assignments

Week 1: Introduction

Week 2: Alan Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815-1918, pp.1-7, 264-269 (handout); Steven Beller, Francis Joseph, pp. 1-14, 34-234

Week 3: Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture

Week 4: Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews: 1867-1938, A Cultural History

Week 5: Arthur Schnitzler, The Road Into the Open

Week 6: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Death and the Fool; Electra; The Tower

Week 7: Karl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind. A Tragedy in Five Acts

Week 8: Franz Kafka, The Trial

Week 9: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (English translation), pp. 3-175, 284-329

Week 10: Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State; Old-New Land

Week 11: No Class-Individual meetings will take place to discuss paper topics.

Week 12: Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents; Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis

Week 13: Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

Week 14: Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

Week 15: Student Presentations

Week 16: Student Presentations-papers due

Teaching Austria, Volume 2 (2006) 99 Works Cited Beller, Steven. Francis Joseph. London: Longman, 1996.

---. The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1938: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Freud, Sigmund Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.

---. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.

Janik, Allan, and Stephen Toulmin. Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.

Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1971.

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. Three Plays. Trans. Alfred Schwarz. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1966.

Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Knopf, 1986.

Kraus, Karl. The Last Days of Mankind, a Tragedy in Five Acts. Trans. Alexander Gode. New York: Ungar Publishing Co., 2000.

Musil, Robert, The Man Without Qualities. Trans. Sophie Wilkins. London: Picador, 1995.

Okey, Robin. The Habsburg Monarchy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.

Roth, Joseph. The Radetzky March. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1995.

Schnitzler, Arthur. The Road Into The Open. Trans. Roger Byers. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

Schorske, Carl. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1981.

Sked, Alan. The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815-1918. London: Longman, 1989.

Zweig, Stefan. The World of Yesterday. New York: Viking Press, 1943.

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